Meet + Eat: Visit Another Australia. Visit Another Hume.

An exhibition of films by Curious Works

CuriousWorks is a Sydney-based community cultural development organisation working primarily in digital media. CuriousWorks seeks to empower people of diverse backgrounds to tell their own stories through film, as well as providing training and leadership opportunities to create pathways to future opportunities and employment.

Meet+Eat is a three-year project in Hume City, in parallel with Liverpool City in Western Sydney, NSW. In its first year, CuriousWorks has begun building the long-term creative capacity of ‘Cultural Leaders’ via a program of hands-on training and mentoring through the making of documentary film.

In Hume, the project has so far produced three episodes, documenting intercultural stories and celebrating the extraordinary lives of a number of residents. Each episode features the act of sharing a meal as a way of getting people from different walks of life to sit down and ‘have a yarn’.

Meet+Eat reminds us that we don’t know the stories behind many of the people we come into contact with. We may exchange words with them in a staff meeting, at a family function, in the sports dressing room or across the backyard fence, but without knowing the whole story we form our own assumptions about who they are and what they think.

When we are invited into someone’s home to share a meal with them, we begin to gain a fuller picture of a person. The exchange of stories between two people, who might otherwise have never dined together, fosters deeper and more personal conversations about diversity in our community.

Working directly with four families and two established community groups from Hume, these films use the joyous occasion of music, dance, cooking and new friendship as a means to visit themes of immigration, displacement, identity, personal history, youth culture and undiscovered talent.

The project features musical collaborations between local composer David Osborne and Iraqi Pop-star Yousif Aziz, as well as the Samoan Community Choir, Meadows Primary School Choir and Gladstone Park Primary School Choir.

Meet+Eat is an initiative of CuriousWorks, with the generous support of VicHealth, Scanlon Foundation and Hume City Council’s Community Grants Program.